Chapter 4:
Bruce grabbed his backpack and quickly set his phone to override the camera watching the alley.
"Come on," Bruce called as he ran at a side wall of the alley, jumping and kicking off it to grab the top of the wall and pulled himself up. He reached down to offer Dinah a hand only to have her copy his move and pull herself up. Bruce once again reminded himself that despite her party girl attitude, this wasn't a girl to be underestimated.
He made sure to leave a little present behind for the pervert guard then they quickly made their way through the complex, disabling cameras as they went and being careful to avoid the patrols. Once inside the main building, it began to become much more difficult to move quickly. There were dozens of guards, thugs, scientists and even businessmen roaming the halls. Most, including the man they were looking for, were gathering in a large central room.
"What is this place?" Dinah whispered.
Bruce just shook his head and quickly led her into an adjoining office that let them hear the proceedings inside. Pulling up the surveillance video they watched as a large man in an expensive suit stood at the front of the gathered crowd.
"As you saw today, our weapons offer you firepower far beyond that of any police force or even military in the world," the man said as he picked up a weapon of a design Bruce didn't recognize. Turning to a target several feet behind him, the man fired the weapon, unleashing an energy pulse that completely obliterated the target and the wall behind it. "But more than that, the weapons we've brought today are capable of reshaping the face of the planet, in some cases; literally."
The man picked up something from the table of weapons beside him that looked like a slightly oversized, metallic football.
"The boys at the lab call this little beauty a Schwarzschild trigger, I call it one bad-ass bomb," he said as he tossed the device to one of the men he was obviously trying to sell it to.
"Hey!" the man hollered as he caught the device and quickly set it down on the table as gently as possible.
"Ha ha, don't worry!" the salesman laughed. "You could run that little gem over with a truck and it wouldn't detonate. Without the right arming code, it's useless."
"A Schwarz-a-what?" Dinah whispered.
"Schwarzschild was a physicist in the early nineteen hundreds who's worked helped prove the existence of black holes," Bruce explained. "And I can't say I like the implication of a bomb that's carrying his name."
"Arm that little baby and when the timer stops, London and everything for another ten miles beyond it in any direction is nothing but a hole in the ground," the salesman finished. "All you have to do is finish a few jobs for Intergang and you'll have an arsenal to rival any country in the world."
"We need to take out those weapons," Bruce whispered.
"We're just here for the antidote," Dinah reminded him. "This is way over our heads."
"If those weapons get out of here, thousands, if not millions of people are going to die," Bruce argued. "I can't let that happen. I won't let someone else lose their family because I didn't stop it." The last statement came out with a bit more force than Bruce intended and he wasn't even sure it was the weapons he was talking about anymore.
"Okay," Dinah said putting a comforting hand on his forearm. "Ted or my Mom would never walk away from this, I guess I can't either."
Bruce nodded his thanks, then turned his attention back to the job at hand.
"There's a lab setup just down the hall from here," Bruce said as he switched the video to the lab camera. "The snake in that aquarium is the same one that's venom was used in the poison they hit Grant with."
"So that's probably where the cure is!" Dinah reasoned.
Bruce nodded his agreement, "That was my thought."
Making their way silently down the hall, they turned into the lab and locked the door behind them, hoping it would buy them a few seconds if someone came to check the lab.
Bruce moved quickly to the computer, pulling a USB cable from his phone and plugging it in. It only took a minute to get through the basic security and get access to the files on the system.
Guess they weren't expecting anyone to be able to get in here, Bruce thought. It was the only reason he could think of for having such weak security on such damning evidence.
Dinah explored the room, looking for anything that might lead them to a cure. Despite a fridge full of samples and vials, none of it appeared to be related to the toxin used on Grant.
"Well the good news is that, according to this, there is an antidote," Bruce said.
"I knew it!" Dinah said with a smile.
"The bad news is there isn't any in this lab," he continued. "It looks like our man's name is James Lawton, and Grant's blackmail is assigned to him. If the antidote is anywhere, it's with him."
"Then let's go get him and the weapons and get the hell out of here," Dinah replied. "My uncle has less than a day left!"
"Just a second," Bruce cautioned. "I want to get a copy of these files. If we can't get the antidote, this information might be enough to let hospital techs synthesize one."
After a minute of downloading the files on the cure and anything else of interest he could find, Bruce unhooked his phone from the system, "Okay, let's get out of here."
They'd barely made it to the door when a powerful shockwave sent them flying across the room and hard into the wall. Bruce was fighting to stay conscious when he saw Lawton walk over to him.
"Huh, just kids," he said. "About the same age as my boys."
"Is that going to be a problem for you, Lawton?" asked the palest man Bruce had ever seen. "You're not getting sentimental on us, are you?"
"Ha, not likely," Lawton replied. "But my boys are useless. These two beat up a half dozen of our men, tracked us down and managed to sneak into the complex. I think we should find out what they know and who they've told."
"You have a point," the pale man agreed. "Take them to the holding cells and call the Interrogator."
Bruce's vision was swimming but he could see just well enough to watch bottom of Lawton's foot collide with his face before everything went dark.